“I REMEMBER the day exactly,” she said in her delicate French accent. “I wasn’t at work, because there had been a lot of
protests and a lot of tension, to the point that you couldn’t leave your home.
Suddenly, we started hearing people screaming in the streets and I got a call
to say that a coup had happened.
The first thing we did was to run onto the
streets and dance with everyone… we were so happy.”

Alida (not real name for security reasons) describes the day of the coup in Burundi which took
place on May 13, 2015, an event that has changed her life.

Burundi had been in a state of
unrest because of an announcement on April 25, 2015 by the ruling political
party, the National Council for the Defense of Democracy – Forces for the
Defence of Democracy (CNDD-FDD), that the incumbent President of Burundi,
Pierre Nkurunziza, would run for a third term in the 2015 presidential
election.

The announcement sparked protests that lasted for weeks with
over 37,000 people leaving the country at that time. While President Nkurunziza
was in neighbouring Tanzania attending the 13th Extraordinary Summit of the
East African Community Heads of State, which had been convened to discuss the
situation in Burundi, army general Godefroid Niyombare said that he was
“dismissing President Pierre Nkurunziza”.

A turn for the worse

For those in opposition to Nkurunziza’s third bid for power,
the general’s announcement of a coup was a welcome one - but things quickly
took a turn for the worse.

“After an hour of the coup announcement, we knew it
had failed. My family is well connected”, explained Alida, “so we
quickly found out, and then came the fear.”

She frantically began to call her relatives because she had
heard that the police forces in the city centre got angry with the people who
were celebrating and had begun to open fire.

Two of her family members got lucky. They had been driving
towards the city centre at the time and their car had been shot at, fortunately
they managed to escape and hide at a nearby hotel.

That night Alida stayed indoors and in the morning, driving
out of the house, all that remained of the coup were barricaded roads, empty
streets and smoking tyres.

In a matter of just two weeks following the coup the number
of people who fled Burundi skyrocketed to over 80,000 – today it stands at over
225,000. Alida is one of those people.

Come the crackdown

Following the re-election of Nkurunziza in July, the
government issued a warning that it would crackdown on those who opposed it.

Since then thousands of people have been arrested and bodies
keep being dumped on the streets. The government justifies the killings of
civilians at the hands of the police as retaliation against people who are
attacking them and creating a problem.

Alida says that most of the people being killed are the unarmed
civilians who were, or are, against the government.

“You don’t see it easily – but it’s happening and the regime isn’t hiding it at all. At
the beginning of the crisis they were hiding – now, they go into the
neighbourhoods, they take people out of their homes and kill them…because they
have guns and the civilians don’t.”

Unable to find work in Burundi’s climate of crisis, and out
of her family’s concern for her safety, Alida has moved to Kigali – her family
scattered. One of her relatives, being Rwandan, fled the country in fear of her
life because, Alida explains, “the government is using this crisis as an excuse
to hunt Rwandese people.”

Today, the country is still managing to function in a “very,
very slow way”. People are scared, the price of food and goods has doubled,
investors have run away, hotels and restaurants are empty and there is barely
any life on the streets of Bujumbura past 6pm.

For her family, the fear is mostly of the insecurity that
has risen across the city because of the loss of jobs and increasing poverty –
people are being held at gunpoint and banks are even being robbed during the
day, shortening their opening hours, and closing their doors at 4pm.

Financing the terror campaign

For now, her family’s interaction with the government is limited to when officials show up to the businesses they own, that they worked so hard to
rebuild following the civil war, demanding money. Their companies are held hostage
to finance the terror campaign.

When asked how she sees this all ending, her answer is fear
numbing.

“If nobody is going to intervene, you’re going to see
another Rwanda [genocide of 1994], of that I’m convinced.”

Already there are signs of this happening. Mistrust is
beginning to seep through society, “you have to check who you’re talking to,
because you never know who is working with the government”.

She said that there are “a lot of people making a lot of
money telling on those who protested during the crisis”.

Her concerns for her family are now at an all time high
because the government is “creating an ethnic problem” that “nearly all the young
people who are dying and being targeted are Tutsis”. She says her family will be at particular
risk “because with [ethnic cleansing]– you start above – the intellectuals,
people with money.”

Falling apart

Alida’s experience is a unique one.

Her parents are successful business people in Burundi but their lives have been torn apart
by the massacres, civil war and now this crisis.

When she was younger, her siblings and mother were forced
to flee Burundi to Belgium when the civil war broke out in 1993 – later she returned leaving
the children in Belgium under the care of some family friends.

Being wealthy and well-connected were two factors that have
ensured Alida and her parents and siblings have survived.

During the civil war they were only able to get out of
Burundi because of their expat friends who helped them get visas. “In times of
crisis,” she explained, “first they evacuate their own citizens, they then
avoid giving visas because there’s a high probability you won’t be going back”.

Alida’s life over the next few years was characterized by
moments of stability and anguish. They managed to escape a lot of it, but they
couldn’t run away completely – from traumatic experiences of grenades being
thrown into her home - which, said, “by
God’s grace didn’t detonate”, the impact of economic decline on their livelihoods or the annoyance of not being able to apply to
universities because of visa problems.

For a time life had normalised in Burundi and Alida moved
back, but now, it’s all falling apart.

*All names were changed to protect the identity of the
source and the family.